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Dr Cecily Maller

Dr Cecily Maller is a Vice Chancellor’s Senior Research Fellow in RMIT's Centre for Urban Research (2016–2019).

As co-leader of the Beyond Behaviour Change Research Programme, she studies human-environment interactions, sustainability and health in the context of everyday life in urban environments.

Cecily is Deputy Theme Leader for Liveability in the Clean Air and Urban Landscapes Hub with colleagues from RMIT and the universities of Melbourne, Wollongong and Western Australia (funded by the National Environmental Sciences Programme until 2020). Recent projects include a five-year project with VicHealth and industry partners exploring how best-practice planning affects residents’ health and wellbeing in a master-planned estate in Melbourne. Previously at RMIT she has researched social practices involving energy and water use in culturally diverse households and studied green renovators and housing sustainability in low-income households.

Cecily has published widely on the health benefits of contact with nature, including as lead author on the Healthy Parks, Healthy People report (Parks Victoria 2002, 2008) and several highly cited journal articles. Recently, she co-edited a book on interventions to improve sustainability titled Social Practices, Interventions and Sustainability: Beyond Behaviour Change (Routledge, 2014).

Before joining RMIT, Cecily was a social scientist for the Australian Department of Agriculture where she managed research projects commissioned by policymakers on change in rural industries and communities. She has conducted social and environmental research for Australian universities and governments since 1998. Cecily has a BSc Hons in Environmental Studies (Behavioural Ecology) and a PhD in Health Promotion on contact with nature and children’s mental, emotional and social health (funded by VicHealth).

This project aims to establish a network of integrated urban greening study sites to understand, quantify and qualify the multiple benefits of urban greening, including for biodiversity outcomes and for human health and wellbeing.

Apart from formal parks and gardens, street verges and other planned greenspaces, most cities have pockets of unplanned vegetation and leftover open spaces, including vacant lots, railway verges and drainage channels.

By transcending disciplinary boundaries researchers can reconceptualise human-nature relations. Issues of the scale of mass species extinctions or climate change are never going to be solved by a single discipline acting alone.

Research exploring the impact of a bus route a new housing development on Melbourne’s south-east growth corridor has revealed the positive effects on community well being with the early delivery of bus services in new greenfield developments.

Providing good public transport links with job opportunities near affordable housing is crucial to improving the health and wellbeing of residential communities in outer suburban growth areas, according to new research.

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